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Comment by DanBlake | Hacker News Reader

Does he have the same moral reservations for other devices in his life?

ie; what car does he use and own? All (modern) cars accept software updates which is his definition of a computer. Most modern televisions, dvd players, routers and even some microwaves/refrigerators can take firmware updates also.

Genuinely curious about the above - Not being a troll, just wondering how far the man really takes his beliefs. Does he stop at the most publicly noticeable devices ( laptop/cellphone ) or does he go all the way.

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Does he have the same moral reservations for other devices in his life?

Yes, as far as I know.

ie; what car does he use and own? All (modern) cars accept software updates which is his definition of a computer.

I am pretty sure he doesn't drive, but this is what he had to say on the topic:

So, what about cars? Free cars would mean you are free to modify them and redistribute copies. Well, as for the modification, you are free to do that-lots of people modify and customize their cars. But when it comes to redistributing copies, the fact is we don’t have the technology to do it. There is no automatic car copier. Cars, today, are like books before the Xerox machine-the only feasible way to make copies was with a special factory. Copying your car is so hard that it makes little practical difference whether you are allowed to do this. Perhaps someday, through nanotechnology perhaps, a car copier will be developed. Then a Free Car Movement will be necessary.

Source: http://www.resonancepub.com/rstallman.htm

In fact, to equate cars and computers in this manner is to commit a Category Error. They simply don't share very many properties (save that they are both sold for money).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

Don't forget modern cars are computers with wheels. Every time you drive (or ride) one, you bet your life on the correctness of the software running its various vital components.

Buggy software can cause the Lithium batteries under your seat to overheat and, maybe, catch fire. Perhaps violently.

Except that cars contain thousands of microchips and pieces of software that run things like your radio, ABS, and other major systems in the car.

My 1978 Land Rover Series III doesn't have a single computer! It's the mechanical equivalent of the GNU project.

Awesome you still have that on the road. Im guessing you live in the south? Biggest difference I always notice about cali vs northeast is the amount of old cars on the road.

You will always see a bevy of antiques on the road anywhere the roads aren't salted during the winter.

I'm in the UK!

In the south of the UK?

The middle at the moment. There's no point in owning anything with wheels larger than shirt buttons in the south.

The south of uk is the opposite of the south of the US.

I think the whole of the UK is opposite of the south of the US

Some of it is actually pretty close unfortunately.

For the person who downvoted me, have you ever lived in Slough?

By that token, asking RMS about cars in relation to his attitude towards computer would be akin to asking whether he lives in civilization or not, since everything from traffic lights to voting machines don't have open software at all. The category error is one of scale, not technical advancement.

Example of a category error (stolen from Ryle): you are handed both the left glove and the right glove, and you ask where the pair is. The pair is not a separate thing from the left glove and the right glove.

'Category error' does not mean a quantitative or scale difference at all.

Well... I still own (and use, once every couple weeks) a car that runs on ethanol and has an analog electronic injection. The radio is, most probably, its smartest part ;-)

It can be examined and changed, but it's not as easy as recompiling its engine.

I think if ever a car was to be copied, the technology to allow it would have it's roots in today's 3D printers. Something that emulates the star trek emulator in a terribly rudimentary way isn't all that far off from what we have now with these technologies.

My understanding of his position is that he does not consider firmware to be independent software. The arguments by which he came to be in favor of free software do not apply to firmware.

The reason that he promotes free software is because software is capable of being free, that is, it is logistically realistic that people freely copy, modify, and distribute it. From this, he extrapolates that there is a right to copy, modify, and distribute software. If would be physically capable of modifying the code, but is legally prevented, then that is a restriction on his rights.

Under his reasoning, it also does not apply to firmware. Because it is so tied to the underlying hardware, it's not really possible to copy or modify it in any useful way. It is certainly free, in the monetary sense, but there are no useful results of doing so. Therefore, closed software does not restrict your rights in a meaningful or non-trivial sense.

Note that this is just my interpretation of what I've read of him, and I don't follow the Free Software thing that closely so I could be mis-interpreting key points.

> Because it is so tied to the underlying hardware

Firmware has changed over the years, as have the devices we embed it into. Thee devices are much more complex and capable, sometimes, smarter than the computers they connect to. I have worked with devices that ran MS-DOS-like OSs and applications on 386-class processors with built-in printers running a real-time Unix-like OS on a 32-bit RISC processor.

Also, many different devices share common hardware and designs. Hundreds of routers and other various networking devices currently run OpenWRT firmware instead of their original software. Those little boxes are smarter than the first Unix machines I used and at least an order of magnitude smarter than the Burroughs B-500 mainframe that ran land taxes for a whole city on my first internship. All it lacks is a line printer and tape drives.

Isn't the whole point of his choosing that particular laptop that it has Free firmware as well? Similarly, he chooses to use gNewSense because it doesn't include any firmware blobs or similar. That suggests to me that firmware is also something he cares about - because if you run Free software on top of a non-Free firmware, it is possible that the firmware could undermine your freedom - for example, a firmware update might remove the ability for you to install other operating systems.

Does he have the same moral reservations for other devices in his life?

Do you have perfect moral consistency in everything you do? I don't. I'd guess that it's not even possible, let alone human nature.

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